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Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

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Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#321
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occlusion culling and LOD should be handled by the engine, not the game logic, so the write-up really points to the problem being Unity's new and very incomplete rendering pipeline for ECS.

Granted I know next to nothing about game development, but aren't LOD models made by hand?

There are tons of answers to this! I'm going to say that in projects I've worked on, LODs have been hand made about 60% of the time.

There are tools for creating automatic LODs that come with their own pro's and con's. A bad LOD chain can express itself as really obvious pop-in while you're playing the game. There's also these things called imposters that are basically flipbook images of an object from multiple angles that can be used in place of the true 3d geometry at a distance. Those are created automatically. They tend to be like 4 triangles but can eat more vram because of the flipbook sizes.

Unreal engine has nanite, which is a really fancy way to side step needing LOD chains with something akin to tessellation, as I understand it. Tech like that is likely the future, but it is not accurate to describe it as the "way most games are made today"

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#322
post #221
post #102

> This mesh of a pile of logs is similarly only used in the shadow rendering pass, and features over 100K vertices. But… why?

Because it is one of the 1,000,000 things to pay attention to in game development. Someone or some software probably just made a mistake in setting up its LOD. Or some dynamic LODding code didn't properly cull the LOD0 mesh. Or that code couldn't be finished in time. Or it was something else. It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. Budgets are always limiting, and developmen…

> It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things.

No, mate, stop. The state of C:S2 is well beyond anything we should accept as "completely normal". It's a defective product that should not have been released. Stop normalising this crap.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#323

It's kind of stunning that a game of this magnitude is able to go out the door without model LOD. I suppose the fact that it runs at all is stunning -- surely you could not get away with this a decade or two ago -- but perhaps it speaks to the incredible capabilities of modern hardware. This feels a bit similar to the Electron criticism, where convenience ultimately trumps performance, and users ultimately don't care…

I don't remember game engines ever being polished and tuned. If you needed optimization it was always on the community to figure it out. Usually they'd do a good job though and make it go up 10 fold compared to what the game devs came up with.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#324
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is one of the 1,000,000 things to pay attention to in game development. Someone or some software probably just made a mistake in setting up its LOD. Or some dynamic LODding code didn't properly cull the LOD0 mesh. Or that code couldn't be finished in time. Or it was something else. It's completely normal in AAA games to have a few imperfect and in-optimal things. Budgets are always limiting, and developmen…

I get that you can leave a bunch of things unoptimized, as long as it works fine. What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?

I _guarantee_ they knew about it.

They even posted on social media 1 week before launch warning people to expect lower than expected performance, and raised the system requirements.

If companies have to decide between prioritising features that they've advertised, show stopper bugs, and performance, guess which one always takes the back seat :)

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#325

> Quite a few YouTubers and streamers got early access to the game, but they were explicitly forbidden to talk about performance until the regular review embargo was lifted. This, along with games like Alan Wake 2 getting phenomenal reviews in the face of terrible performance and game breaking bugs, makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too.

> makes me wonder why folks trust the current corrupt review system, of which streamers are now part of too. Agreed. There's such a whole world of unreported 'sponsored' or otherwise products, and streaming is a big part of it. And no-one is immune. When the cheesegrater Mac Pro came out, I watched a lot of videos on it, particularly on YouTube in the photo/video segment - I was planning to get one, and while I had o…

Hey, it worked for Jerry Pournelle and Robert Scoble ...

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#326
post #277

One conclusion is that Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga with pieces in random state of readiness and compatibility. More and more Unity comes out looking like a mismanaged mess that lost its way from the goal of "democratizing game development". I'm guessing the studio was pressured to release on a hard deadline to make the publisher their promised profits. This game would have been a guaranteed…

> "Unity's technology stack is more like a Tower of Jenga" Unity has a RELATIVELY firm foundation, and lots of optional out buildings that are short jenga towers. It does take some bonecasting to identify which is which. I would characterize the use of DOTs in a product you mean to ship as _gutsy_. For my projects I'd be liable to first write a compute shader for anything they used DOTs for. Despite all that, from my…

If your stack merely had "run the production code on a typical user environment" as part of the process, you'd have caught this ahead of release though.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#327
Making a AAA game sounds horrible. And making one in Unity sounds doubly so. All of these things sound like fixable issues. They'll likely be fixed. Hopefully the developers made these oversights because they focused on what makes the game worth fixing to begin with: that the gameplay is fun. In many recent games I feel developers have focused on the wrong things and totally forgot the core, meaning if they fix the bugs - the game is still quite hollow (cough, Starfield). A game like this should of ocourse have a continous perf process and if it doesn't run ok (min 30fps on median hardware 60 on enthusiast hardware for example) then it just shouldn't ship. I wish more studios would stop having crunchtime for meaningless deadlines such as holiday seasons. Someone has said "it's ok to be just 10fps on beefy hardware, we can fix that later, let's ship it now".

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#328
post #139

While the complaints about performance are valid, I’m still having a blast with the game. Having an 11 month old means it’s hard to go deep into something like Cyberpunk since I only get short gaming bursts (ie 7:30 when she goes to bed until 8:30 when I turn off screens). Not enough to play a deep narrative game but plenty of time to expand out my industrial area, fix a highway interchange and figure out what’s goin…

The complaints are valid to some extent, but also overblown too. People complaining that 30-50 FPS is unplayable need to get some perspective on what is and is not playable. And even the article here drops some hot hyperbole when it says that the game runs worse than CP2077 with max settings and path tracing. I've run (tried to run) CP in such a configuration, and I get framerates in the teens . By contrast I haven't…

[deleted]

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#329
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very idealistic black-and-white view of the world. A huge number of roles casually use the "engineer" moniker and a lot of people who actually have engineering degrees of some sort, even advanced degrees from top schools, are not licensed and don't necessarily follow rigid processes (e.g. structural analyses) on a day to day basis. As someone who does have engineering degrees outside of software, I have zero…

I have yet to see, with the exception of the software world, engineering with such loose process.

As someone who was a mechanical engineer in the oil business, I think you have a very positive view of engineering processes in general.

Re: Why Cities: Skylines 2 performs poorly

#330

DOTS is the brain child of Mike Action. See his 2014 CppCon "Data-Oriented Design and C++" [1]. But Mike has left Unity, according to his twitter. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc

The same Mike Action that claimed that 30 fps games sold better than 60 fps games using a very questionable data set (excluding sports games etc).
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